Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres minor releases — how the schedule works, options for upgrading to them, and the importance of reading the release notes. Here are some links to things they mentioned: PostgreSQL 16.3, 15.7, 14.12, 13.15, and 12.19 released (announcement) https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-163-157-1412-1315-and-1219…

Bharath Rupireddy has carved a niche for himself in the Postgres community since he began using the database system back in 2020. From his start at EnterpriseDB to making strides at Microsoft, and now contributing to the AWS open-source project, Bharath is entrenched in the inner workings of Postgres development. He has worked in many areas of Post…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss how hacking on Postgres is hard, a notifier pattern for using Listen/Notify, using histograms for metrics and saturated arithmetic. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/315-hacking-on-postgres-is-hard/…

Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician a…

Nikolay and Michael discuss custom and generic planning in prepared statements — how it works, how issues can present themselves, some ways to view the generic plan, and some benefits of avoiding planning (not just time). Here are some links to things they mentioned: PREPARE https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-prepare.html track_activity_qu…

As the podcast host of The Builders, member of Postgres Women, and Staff Engineer at EDB, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek is passionate to see where this space will take us. We kick off Season 2 with Gülçin as she shares her journey in the tech industry, CloudNativePG, the impact of AI on Postgres, and the representation of women in the Postgres community.…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss performance improvements for pgvector 0.7.0, a guide to vector embeddings, building a Retrieval Augmented Generation app and only allow logins to replicas. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/314-150-times-faster-pgvector/…

Nikolay and Michael discuss LIMIT in Postgres — what it does, how it can help with performance, and an interesting example where adding it can actually hurt performance(!) Here are some links to things they mentioned: LIMIT considered harmful in PostgreSQL (Twitter thread by Christophe Pettus) https://twitter.com/Xof/status/1413542818673577987 LIMI…

Alongside his peers studying Systems Network Engineering, Jelte Fennema-Nio unearthed a security vulnerability within the framework of Postgres. Since then, Jelte joined the world of cybersecurity and network engineering. He is currently Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Citus/ Postgres/ PgBouncer. In this episode we explore: Fork…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss whether the future of MySQL is Postgres, how to use recursive CTEs, work on OrioleDB, and PG17 performance improvements. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/313-the-future-of-mysql-is-postgres/…

Nikolay and Michael return to the topic of using the buffers explain parameter — with a new analogy, some (conspiracy) theories of why it's still not on by default, and some related chat about the serialize parameter coming in 17. Here are some links to things they mentioned: BUFFERS by default (episode 4) https://postgres.fm/episodes/buffers-by-de…

Amit Kapila is a PostgreSQL Committer and a Senior Director at Fujitsu India. Amit joins the show to share his contributions to logical replication enhancements (achieving highly available systems), his involvement in the PostgreSQL community, and his perspective on contributions from tech giants in advancing PostgreSQL features. In this episode we…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we cover potential features in Postgres 17 such as explain serialize, verbose copy, pg_buffer_cache_evict, as well as many others. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/312-postgres-17-commit-orama/…

Nikolay and Michael discuss doing massive DELETE operations in Postgres — what can go wrong, how to prevent major issues, and some ideas to minimise their impact. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Article based on Nikolay’s talk, including batching implementation (translated to English) https://habr-com.translate.goog/en/articles/523536…

As Principal Architect at Tembo and the creator of PGXN, David Wheeler is a seminal figure in the Postgres world. Join us as we discuss David's tenure at The New York Times, his influential projects like Bricolage and pgTAP, and the game-changing database change management system, Sqitch. In this episode we explore: David Wheeler's transition from …

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss a 1,400 times faster max and group by implementation, new quantization capabilities in pgvector, adaptive radix trees and splitting & merging partitions in PG17. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/311-max-group-by-performance/…

Nikolay and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur, CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, to discuss how to overcome several logical replication issues. They discuss the protocol versions, minimising slot growth, minimising lag, and some tips and tricks for scaling things well. Here are some links to things they mentioned: PeerDB https://www.peerdb.io/ Our ep…

Denis Magda is the mastermind behind the innovative extension PgCompute and a pivotal figure in the world of Postgres development. With over a decade and a half of experience, Denis cut his teeth on Postgres during its use in high-traffic social networking projects in Eastern Europe and has continued to push the envelope at Yugabyte as the head of …

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss whether Postgres will pull a Redis, remembering Simon Riggs, built-in collation provider and C.UTF-8 in PG 17 and health checks. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/310-andres-microsoft-postgres-save-linux/…

You have to find what works for you and Chris Ellis has never been the kind of person that could go and sit in a library—for Chris, the most productive Postgres place is in a coffee shop. In this episode of the Path To Citus Con podcast for developers who love Postgres, Chris Ellis joined Claire and Pino to chat about his path to becoming more (and…

Nikolay and Michael discuss several "Don't do this" lists about Postgres — picking out their favourite items, as well as some contentious ones that could be clearer, or not included. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Don’t do this (PostgreSQL wiki page) https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This How to get into trouble using some Po…

Andrew Atkinson is a Software Engineer who specializes in building high-performance web applications using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails. He wrote the book ‘High-Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’, published by Pragmatic Programmers in 2024. Our discussion with Andrew spans the technical challenges of sharding and the concurrent evolution of Rails an…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss whether Postgres will pull a Redis, remembering Simon Riggs, built-in collation provider and C.UTF-8 in PG 17 and health checks. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/309-will-postgres-pull-a-redis/…

Nikolay and Michael have a high-level discussion on all things search — touching on full-text search, semantic search, and faceted search. They discuss what comes in Postgres core, what is possible via extensions, and some thoughts on performance vs implementation complexity vs user experience. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Simon Ri…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss high availability's future, a custom sharding solution by Figma, sharding pg_vector queries, and PG17 logical replication failover. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/308-scale-through-sharding/…

Nikolay and Michael discuss Postgres health checks — what they are, things to include, how often makes sense, and whether improvements to Postgres would increase or decrease the need for them. Here are some links to things they mentioned: MOT (car test in the UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOT_test Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded (discussio…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss whether we should be using bytewise or linguistic ordering by default, how to transform data in Postgres, benefits of a transaction_timeout and how to enforce join order. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/307-collation-conund…

Nikolay and Michael discuss the superuser role in PostgreSQL — what it is, how and when it shouldn’t be used, and whether most cloud providers are right to not give us it (no prizes for guessing). Here are some links to things they mentioned: superuser (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/role-attributes.html#id-1.6.9.6.2.1.2.1.1 Crunchy …

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss one configuration change that resulted in an 11,000 times faster query, why Postgres is not using your index, backported PG improvements and parallelism with TOAST. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/306-scalability-limits-fro…

Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI. From Copilot to ChatGPT to Postgres’s powerful AI capabilities (think: pgvector), AI is everywhere. In this episode of Path To Citus Con, for developers who love Postgres, Arda Aytekin joined Claire and Pino to chat about spinning up on Postgres and AI. Arda shared his origin story in mechanical eng…

Nikolay and Michael discuss transaction_timeout (a recently committed addition for Postgres 17) — what it's for, how to get around not having it already, and whether it will replace the need to set statement_timeout globally in future. Here are some links to things they mentioned: transaction_timeout (devel docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/dev…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss one configuration change that resulted in an 11,000 times faster query, why Postgres is not using your index, backported PG improvements and parallelism with TOAST. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/305-11k-faster-configurati…

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Andrew Atkinson, author of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails, to discuss how Rails and Postgres work together — where the limits are, how people use the ORM, things that are improving, and some things we can do as a Postgres community to make it even better. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Planet …

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss new Postgres releases, performance comparisons between PgBouncer, PgCat and Supavisor, a new extension pg_analytics, and new planner capabilities in PG16. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/304-overhead-of-pg_stat_statements/…

Nikolay and Michael discuss a common question — why Postgres isn't using an index, and what you can do about it! Here are some links to things they mentioned: Why isn’t Postgres using my index? (blog post by Michael) https://www.pgmustard.com/blog/why-isnt-postgres-using-my-index Why isn’t Postgres using my functional index? (Stack Exchange questio…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss new Postgres releases, performance comparisons between PgBouncer, PgCat and Supavisor, a new extension pg_analytics, and new planner capabilities in PG16. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/303-pgbouncer-pgcat-supavisor-fight/…

Nikolay and Michael discuss the overhead of pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_kcache — mostly focusing on some interesting things Nikolay found while stress-testing some large spot instances up to and beyond 2m TPS(!) Here are some links to things they mentioned: pg_stat_statements https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html pg_stat_…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss when and how you should use UUIDs or not, how to optimize space with column order and arrays, whether it is better to tune parameters or queries and what devs should know about Postgres with Andrew Atkinson. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostg…

The best days are when things don’t go as planned. Derk van Veen joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss his journey from Java developer to PostgreSQL specialist and DBA. From his first days with DB2 and Oracle, to his work with Postgres, Derk shared how he learned about databases. And h…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss how you can build a GPT in 500 lines of SQL code, how to optimize extension loading, the best way to set passwords and being able to change generated columns. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/301-postgres-llm-os-30-times-fas…

Michael is joined by Markus Winand, creator of use-the-index-luke.com and modern-sql.com, and author of SQL Performance Explained, to discuss Modern SQL — what Markus means by it, why it's important, some benefits, some examples, and at least one phrase that should be on a t-shirt. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Modern SQL (site) htt…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss how you can build a GPT in 500 lines of SQL code, how to optimize extension loading, the best way to set passwords and being able to change generated columns. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/300-postgres-celebration/…

Michael is joined by Chelsea Dole, Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead of the Data Storage Team at Brex, to discuss bloat. They cover what it is, why it's a problem, strategies for minimising it, and the options when it's really bad. Here are some links to things they mentioned: Managing your tuple graveyard (talk by Chelsea) https://www.youtube.…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss how you can build a GPT in 500 lines of SQL code, how to optimize extension loading, the best way to set passwords and being able to change generated columns. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/299-build-a-gpt-in-sql/…

Michael is joined by Jonathan Katz, PostgreSQL Core Team member, Principle Product Manager at AWS, and also pgvector contributor, to discuss pgvector. They cover what it is, why it's so popular all of a sudden, some tuning and tradeoff guidance, and a look to the future. Here are some links to things they mentioned: pgvector https://github.com/pgve…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss hopes for Postgres in 2024, whether you need foreign keys, incremental backups, and five ways of doing not exists. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/298-10-100-times-higher-latency-with-distributed-postgres/…

No one likes benchmarking. But it can be one of the highest impact things you do. Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their journeys into performance benchmarking. And how it can change the course of your career. Do you need to find bottlenecks in you…

Michael is joined by Alicja Kucharczyk, Program Manager for Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Microsoft and organiser of the Warsaw PostgreSQL User Group, to discuss Alicja's favorite tool: pgBadger. They cover what it is, how and when it's useful, and some guidance for getting the most out of it (without causing an outage). Here are some links to t…

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss hopes for Postgres in 2024, whether you need foreign keys, incremental backups, and five ways of doing not exists. To get the show notes as well as get notified of new episodes, visit: https://www.scalingpostgres.com/episodes/297-postgres-in-2024/توسط Creston Jamison

With Nikolay taking a well-earned break, Michael covers the basics of EXPLAIN — what it is, the parameters available, and a process he recommends for using it. Here are some links to the things mentioned: EXPLAIN (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-explain.html Using EXPLAIN (docs) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/using-explai…